The Tower by Carol Lefevre

Author:Carol Lefevre
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Spinifex Press
Published: 2022-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

THE TOWER

During Hannah’s absence, her husband had decided to sort out his archive. Geoff had taken over the dining-room, emptying his filing cabinets onto the dining-table, so that when Hannah returned unexpectedly from Wellington, they had to eat at the breakfast bar in the kitchen. It could only accommodate two people, side by side, and while their sons Darcy and Max were happy to eat on their laps in front of the television, this was not something Hannah had ever encouraged. She believed shared meals were the glue that held the family together, although after her aborted trip she was no longer certain that holding it together was what she wanted, or that sitting down with Geoff and the boys to plates of stir-fried this and that, or even the ceremonial Sunday roast, was a strong enough adhesive.

Playing over in her head was the woman’s voice that had answered when she rang Simon’s mobile, her hesitant Hello? And then when Hannah had asked for Simon, the voice saying bleakly, Simon? But Simon’s dead, didn’t you know? There had been a long, tense pause, and then the woman had said sharply: Who is this? What on earth had she said? Hannah could hardly remember. Something about checking the citations for a conference paper, and halfway through her stumbling explanation there had been a sound like a hiss. Before she could finish, the woman had hung up.

Geoff was oblivious to his wife’s anguish. Only sixteen-year-old Max sensed that his mother was not her usual self. Hannah saw it in the sidelong glances he aimed at her as she cleared the chaos in the laundry and the refrigerator.

“I was only gone a little over two weeks!” She pulled a face as she drew a bowl of leftover pasta from the back of the fridge.

“If you’d let us know, we’d have all pitched in before you got back,” Geoff said cheerfully.

Hannah intercepted the pitying glance Max aimed at his father and she huddled over the sink, fearful that this son, who was so like her, would somehow divine her thoughts. Because she kept returning to the humiliation of having secretly purchased and packed special underwear. Not only underwear, but perfume. She had not dared bring those flimsy garments home; they were so unlike the functional pieces that filled the bureau drawers in their bedroom. Instead, she had bundled them into a supermarket bag and abandoned them in the public toilets at Wellington airport. Perhaps a cleaner would find the unworn haul and take it home, to be sold on eBay – if you could sell-on such things – or use the garments to galvanise her own sex life.

Hannah had kept the perfume: Guerlain’s L’ Heure Bleue. It had been so expensive that the thought of throwing it away made her nauseous. She’d bought it without testing it on her skin, dreaming only of Jean Rhys and of Parisian trysts. But when she’d sprayed it on her wrists, though interesting at first sniff, it had dried down to a powdery old woman’s scent of dusty irises and violets.

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